The striking part about that article is that there is zero discussion about technical merit. I've never seen nor used a TI 99/9A, but the stories I read weren'

The striking part about that article is that there is zero discussion about technical merit. I've never seen nor used a TI 99/9A, but the stories I read weren't too kind. In my neck of the woods (Denmark), in the 1978-ish your choices were expensive pre-built Z-80 machines, like the Luxor ABC-80 or danish niche computers (some which were actually amazing for the time). I went with a British kit, the Z-80 based Nascom 2. Roughly 1 years later, the market had changed and 6502 based options were abundant with the BBC, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 taking the lead (ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum were popular too). Later Amiga arrived with its own following. All this to say that the world was such a mess of an abundance of incompatible computers that when the IBM PC came out, the main attraction was the belief that, because of I.B.M., this would become popular enough that there would be a critical mass of great and actually useful software. I sometimes try to imagine how things would have played differently had IBM abstained from the "hobby market".